O, you poor Generation Xers, Generation Yers, and Millennials (bent under the load of student debt as if it were a brick-filled backpack), how I pity thee. Thanks to us Baby-Boomers, the demographic bulge that refuses to budge, the remainder of this dec­ade looms like a commemorative rerun of a show you late arrivals didn’t see the first time. It will be a Ferris wheel of golden anniversaries, a rinse cycle of 60s nostalgia nourishing the collective narcissism of Boomers, who held the title of most coddled generation until the unholy rise of hipster parenting. The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the subject of my previous dispatch, is succeeded by the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ invasion of America, in 1964, the subject of the column before you. And we’re just getting started, so save your groans until the end. Lying ahead are the half-century retrospectives of Bob Dylan’s going electric (1965), the debut of Star Trek (1966), the flower-power Summer of Love crowned by the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago (1968), then, capping this cavalcade of last hurrahs, the Woodstock festival, the Manson-family murders, and the moon landing (1969). As any fan of Mad Menknows, the deeper we move into this dec­ade, the darker the events being memorialized and the more nihilistic the fury, with even the mud bath at Woodstock shadowed by the violence months later at the free concert at the Altamont Speedway, where pool cues wielded by Hell’s Angels came whaling down. At least the anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival and their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Showis one of unalloyed joy. The touchdown of Pan Am Flight 101 at J.F.K. Airport on February 7 that brought the Beatles to America set off a thunderclap of euphoria heard round the world and proved to be no temporary flash of mass hysteria or passing fad but the re-start of the 60s after J.F.K.’s funeral procession. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were the heralds of America’s spring awakening, a puberty rite writ large.

The literature of the Beatles has bloated into Shakespearean proportions, with almost no crevice or cubbyhole of Liverpool, Abbey Road studios, Indian ashrams, concert halls, psychological profiles, or interpersonal space unexcavated by fans, former bystanders, fellow musicians, ex-wives, journalists, cultural historians, and that hardy band of nut gatherers that Gore Vidal classified as “scholar-squirrels.” When it comes to the Beatles, the scholar who qualifies as the squirreliest and most nut-productive must be Mark Lewisohn. Billed as the “world’s only professional Beatles historian,” Lewisohn has been dedicating his adulthood to a monumental trilogy titled “The Beatles: All These Years,” whose first volume, Tune In (Crown Archetype), totals more than 900 pages and takes John, Paul, George, and Ringo up to only December 1962 as they fly home to England after playing their last stint in Hamburg, Germany, “flying into a bright white tomorrow,” Lewisohn writes. The year to come would see the release of their first album (Please Please Me), the one-two punch of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the bedlam outbreak of Beatlemania across the land, and, according to the poet Philip Larkin, the introduction of sexual intercourse, which would make the 60s such a thigh smacker of a dec­ade. A book this imposing and crammed with anecdotes, documentation, and period detail has the makings of a feat and a folly, and Tune In doesn’t disappoint on either count. It flaunts a magisterial ambition and a full retinue of scholarly apparatus (copious notes, credits, and index), yet is written in a jocular manner that keeps jabbing you with its elbows. But while I found the over-ingratiating gabbiness of Lewisohn wearying, the grain silo of data he dumps is worth the sifting, and the accompanying photos are like postcards from the pre-dawn of Pop. Those of us who are CBGB veterans may have thought we had it louche, but Hamburg 1961 seems practically medieval, and there’s a hilarious photo of three of the Beatles, posed in cowboy boots and black leather, that makes them look like rough trade, Joe Orton wet dreams poured from an oil can. By the time they landed in America, manager Brian Epstein had performed a radical-conservative makeover, banishing their rockabilly gear for collarless Edwardian suits and Cuban-heeled boots that gave them a neat and spruce spring-action effect—the world’s first pop-up band.

The Beatles’ royal unveiling on The Ed Sullivan Show of February 21, 1964, was the most successful rollout since Cleopatra got spun from the carpet. It was also, as Penelope Rowlands suggests in her introduction to The Beatles Are Here!(Algonquin)—a goody bag of tributes and recollections of that hallowed time—the christening party for the New Journalism, with Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron among the journalists covering the band’s arrival and Gay Talese later that year reporting the hormonal eruption outside the Paramount Theater, where the Beatles were playing a benefit concert. Well-dressed swells in furs and pearls promenaded past a wailing wall of beseeching adolescents. (“It was an incongruous sight last night,” Talese wrote in The New York Times, “one that brought together the chic and shriek sets.”) The New Journalism and the Beatles were part of the same voltage surge that gave the 60s their exclamation mark of now! The Beatles’ first appearance onEd Sullivan was ear-battering and plane-shattering, a national convocation of what media philosopher Marshall McLuhan would call the “all-at-once-ness” of the television revolution. There they were, beamed into our Leave It to Beaver living rooms to an astounding audience of 73 million, the other acts on that Ed Sullivanepisode blown away like yesterday’s papers (just as Elvis Presley did in his first Ed Sullivan appearance, in 1956), their upright aplomb and supersonic cohesion unfazed by the gale-force screams cascading from the female fans in the theater, a banshee cry. “The fascination of the broadcast lay in the counterpoint between the immaculate British boys, who weren’t doing anything that would provoke such an outburst, and these crazy girls, who were going bananas,” Albert Goldman wrote in his biography The Lives of John Lennon. “Explaining this irrational response was the challenge the program offered its reviewers. None of them accepted it. They ignored Beatlemania like a distracting noise and focused exclusively upon the band, which, they concluded, was nothing very special … ” The frowning elders at Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Timesdispensed rinds of derision regarding the broadcast, with perhaps the Washington Post reviewer, Lawrence Laurent, looking down his nose the farthest, disdaining the Beatles as “imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony.” Hillbillies! It was as if the gentlemen of the press couldn’t be bothered to concoct fresh sneers, helping themselves to whatever white-trash slurs they had left over from giving Elvis the works back in the 50s. Well, we know who won the culture war, and it wasn’t the columnists and editorialists drowning their bitter sorrows with Pepto-Bismol.

No one had any way of foreseeing in 1964 how great the Beatles would become, the autumnal introspection of Rubber Soul, the dense, shifting magnetic filings of Revolver, and the splendiferous surrealist revue of Sgt. Pepper still in the future. Rock hadn’t yet acquired its pretensions to grandeur and social relevance, freeing the band and its Gandalf-wise producer, George Martin, space to experiment and play. When you watch the early Beatles footage and the hopscotching antics of A Hard Day’s Night (directed by Richard Lester and edited with magic scissors), the playfulness recalls the early days of silent films, when Chaplin, Keaton, and others figured it out on the fly. The pell-mell fun couldn’t last, and by the end of the dec­ade, when the Beatles performed the impromptu concert on the roof of the Apple studio in the wintry cold for their movie Let It Be, they looked uncomfortable, windblown, harried, and fagged-out from feuding with one another. It wasn’t the most graceful of good-byes, but we should be grateful that they knew to call it quits rather than haul freight for the rest of their careers. Paul evolved into Sir Paul, last of the music-hall troupers, John became a hunger artist, George went wizard, and Ringo, well, Ringo stayed Ringo, still flashing the peace sign. Back atcha baby.